MORE cornea transplants are being carried out here, due to an ageing population and more foreign patients.

Last year, 323 cornea transplants were performed, up from 253 in 2007. 

Professor Donald Tan, director of the Singapore National Eye Centre (SNEC) and medical director of the Singapore Eye Bank (SEB), said that more people are suffering from age-related cornea degeneration, as the population ages.

Many patients also fly here for cornea transplants, as Singapore is the leading centre in Asia for complex new procedures, he said.

To meet the growing need for corneas, the eye centre and bank are turning to Sri Lanka.

They are working with Sri Lanka’s Colombo Eye Hospital to develop a national eye bank, which will meet international standards and provide more corneal donations to the region, including Singapore.

Up to 44 per cent of transplant patients here got corneas from local donors last year.  The rest came mainly from eye banks in the United States.

But this is not ideal, as it takes five to seven days for the corneas to arrive here from the US, dangerously close to the end of their viable period of up to 10 days, said Prof Tan.

The cost of shipping corneas here from the US is also very high – up to $5,000 each.

Shipping corneas from Sri Lanka would take less than half the time and hopefully halve the cost, he said.

For now, Singapore cannot accept donations from Sri Lanka because of quality issues, which the new eye bank will address, Prof Tan added.

It hopes to collect up to 3,000 corneas every year.

Last Friday, the eye centre also set up the Association of Eye Banks of Asia, a network of Asian eye banks to raise eye-banking standards in Asia.

The Lee Foundation is donating $5 million over five years to set up the network and Sri Lanka’s eye bank, and
to expand Singapore’s eye bank.

Temasek Foundation donated $140,000 to another SNEC-SEB initiative – the Lee Kong Chian Centre of Excellence for Cornea, Eye Banking and Eye Diseases – for training, education and research ineye banking and corneal diseases and transplantation.